What will your residency card for Spain look like? Skatz shows you the various kinds of TIE card for temporary & permanent Spanish residents and students, plus what the NIE certificate looks like

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If you want to stay in Spain for more than 90 days, you’re supposed to register for residency. When you do this, you will get a residency card. Which card you get depends on what kind of resident you are.

So let’s split you up into a few different groups.

First of all, it depends on whether you’re a citizen of the EU or not. 

If you are an EU citizen with a passport from an EU country then you don’t need to ask permission to live here because you have the right, so you just register at the police station and get one of these cards.

EU residency card

At the moment, these are quite flimsy pieces of paper with no plastic coating on the front and no photograph, so they can’t be used as an ID on their own. You still need to carry a passport for ID. However, in the not too distant future, EU citizens will be given a proper solid plastic card with the full photo and biometric data on it. I’ll be very happy when that happens.

As you can see, on the card it has your name, address, nationality, date of registration and a very important number called the NIE. 

You may have heard of this on social media, and you may have been confused by people calling their card an NIE card, or even just ‘my NIE’. This is confusing because the NIE is just your foreigners identification number that enables you to engage in transactions like buying a house, and to deal with the tax office. It’s also sometimes referred to as your NIF or tax number. 

Here is the NIE certificate 

The one on the left is an older one, the one on the right is what they look like now. You will need to use this number regularly and frequently, and you will need to show the actual document, so keep copies on paper and digitally. This number lasts for your lifetime, it never needs to be changed, although you may occasionally need to ask for an updated certificate.

Now, most importantly, having this number does not necessarily mean you’re a resident, and NIE is definitely not the correct name for a residency card, in spite of people still using phrases like ‘I’ve got my NIE’ when they mean they’ve got their residency card. It’s always a good idea to check exactly what they mean.

So, which card should you have if you’re not an EU passport holder?

Well, it depends on lots of things. 

Let’s deal first of all with those of you from the UK who lived here before Brexit. You’re in a category of your own, because no country has ever left the EU before. When Brexit happened, there was an agreement made (called the Withdrawal Agreement) that you could register your intention to stay in Spain and have the same rights as EU citizens.

Your previous document wasn’t a card, it was a piece of paper, some of you called it ‘the green paper’, because it looked like this

As you can see, it’s like an A4 version of the new EU card from earlier.

Since Brexit, everyone with one of these was encouraged to swap this document for a plastic card called the TIE. And this is what people are usually referring to when they say ‘NIE card’. The abbreviation simply means ‘foreigners identity card’.

Here’s what it used to look like.

Old TIE card

This one actually belonged to Chris from Upsticks, my regular live guest on YouTooSpain videos. 

And here’s what it looks like now…

TIE permanent 

As you can see, it says Permanente, Articulo 50, which means you have permanent residency because of article 50 of the withdrawal agreement. If your card says Temporal instead of Permanente, it means you’ve lived here for less than 5 years, but if you fulfill the necessary requirements, you’ll be able to get the permanent status card when you’ve lived here for more than 5 years.

What if you arrived in Spain after Brexit, or you’re from another non-EU country? 

You would have had to apply first of all for a visa in your home country (we’ve got articles & videos all about how to do that) then once you get the visa stamped into your passport, you travel to Spain and get your TIE card. What does it look like? Well, it depends, because you might be the applicant, in which case your temporary card will look like this…

TIE temporal

Note that it says ‘Resi y Trabajo’, which means you have the right to live and work here. If you had applied for a Non Lucrative visa it would specify that on the card, because you don’t have the right to work with that visa.

If you’re not the applicant, you might be a member of the applicant’s family, in which case your card will look a bit like this

TIE family member

Actually this one belongs to the ‘familiar’ of an EU citizen, which is different from being the family member of a non-EU visa applicant, but I think by now you’re getting the general idea that the cards look very similar, except for the line across the middle which tells you what rights you have.

It’s very important when you get your card to check that the details are correct. It’s possible to go back later and get it corrected, but it’s better to sort it out there and then when you have all of your documents in front of the official. 

Let’s have a look at a couple more cards.

TIE for research study

This says it’s an extended stay card for research study purposes, and it doesn’t allow the bearer to work.

There’s also the standard Student card, which looks a bit different from the others.

There’s one more card to show you. This is the one that Spanish citizens have, called the DNI, which means National Identity Card, and it looks like this…

DNI of Spanish Citizen

…that’s the old kind at the top and the new one at the bottom.

That just about covers the NIE number, TIE cards and EU residency cards. If you have any questions, ask in the comments below.

Peace and Love, let’s dance!

Article by Skatz